Quick Links - Poets.org

follow poets.org

Search form

The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

related poems

occasions

On December 13, 1911, Kenneth Patchen was born in Niles. A poor boy throughout his childhood, he spent his time playing football and working in a factory. He enjoyed publishing in his school newspaper, kept a diary from the age of twelve, and began reading Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Robert Burns, and Herman Melville.

After high school, he moved to Wisconsin and attended Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College for one year and then the University of Wisconsin. Around this time, Patchen published a sonnet, "Permanence," in the New York Times. He continued his education in Arkansas and then spent years traveling. He was employed as a migrant worker in a variety of jobs in the United States and Canada.

In 1933, he fell in love with Miriam Oikemus, who he married the following year. The couple lived in Greenwich Village for a few years while Patchen finished and later published his first book of verse, Before the Brave, in 1936.

Over the course of his career, he wrote more than forty books of poetry, prose and drama, including Bury Them in God and First Will and Testament (both in 1939), The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), The Dark Kingdom (published in a limited edition of seventy-five copies with individually painted covers) and The Teeth of the Lion (both in 1942), Sleepers Awake (1946), To Say if You Love Someone (1948), Poemscapes (1958), and But Even So: Picture Poems (1968).

Patchen was also interested in collaboration and multi-media experimentation. With the composer John Cage, he created the radio play The City Wears A Slouch Hat (broadcast in 1942), and in 1957 he performed with the Chamber Jazz Sextet, helping to further Jazz Poetry. Perhaps most notably, Patchen engaged in the visual arts, creating painted poems throughout his career.

"It happens that very often my writing with pen is interrupted by my writing with brush, but I think of both as writing," said Patchen. "In other words, I don’t consider myself a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend."

For more than thirty years, Patchen lived with a severe spinal ailment that caused him almost constant physical pain. An operation in the early 1950s, thanks to a fund set up by his fellow poets, including T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and E. E. Cummings, allowed him to regain his mobility, but the relief was short-lived: a mistake during a follow-up surgery in 1959 left him almost completely bedridden for the remaining thirteen years of his life, during which he created his most visually remarkable works.

The weight of this personal battle was compounded by his sensitivity to greater issues of humanity, and his poetry paid special attention to the horrors of war. With his work, he tried to create a kind of sanctuary for the reader, apart from reality, where larger-than-life characters were motivated by their loving and benevolent natures.

In 1967, the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities presented Patchen with an award for a "life-long contribution to American letters." He died while living in California in 1972.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Before the Brave (1936)First Will and Testament (1939)The Dark Kingdom (1942)The Teeth of the Lion (1942)Cloth of the Tempest (1943)Pictures of Life and Death (1946)Selected Poems (1946)Panels for the Walls of Heaven (1947)First Will and Testament (1948)Red Wine and Yellow Hair (1949)Hurrah for Anything (1957)When We Were Here Together (1957)Because It Is: Poems and Drawings (1960)The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen (1960)Double Header, includes Poemscapes and Hurrah for Anything (1966)Hallelujah Anyway: Picture Poems (1966)But Even So: Picture-Poems (1968)Love and War Poems (1968)Collected Poems (1969)Wonderings: Picture Poems (1971)In Quest of Candlelighters (1972)Patchen's Lost Plays (1977)

Prose

Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941)Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (1945)Sleepers Awake (1946)They Keep Riding Down All the Time (1946)See You in the Morning (1947)

The Orange Bears

Kenneth Patchen, 1911 - 1972

The Orange bears with soft friendly eyes
Who played with me when I was ten,
Christ, before I'd left home they'd had
Their paws smashed in the rolls, their backs
Seared by hot slag, their soft trusting
Bellies kicked in, their tongues ripped
Out, and I went down through the woods
To the smelly crick with Whitman
In the Haldeman-Julius edition,
And I just sat there worrying my thumbnail
Into the cover---What did he know about
Orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft coal
And the National Guard coming over
From Wheeling to stand in front of the millgates
With drawn bayonets jeering at the strikers?
I remember you would put daisies
On the windowsill at night and in
The morning they'd be so covered with soot
You couldn't tell what they were anymore.
A hell of a fat chance my orange bears had!

Kenneth Patchen

Born in 1911, Kenneth Patchen is the author of numerous collections of poetry and received an award for life-long contribution to American letters from the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities

by this poet

There's a place the man always say
Come in here, child
No cause you should weep
Wolf never catch such a rabbit
Golden hair never turn white with grief
Come in here, child
No cause you should moan
Brother never hurt his brother
Nobody here ever wander without a home
There must be some such place somewhere
But